They had turned on to the crest road, the fabled Chemin des Dames itself. Elizabeth's eye was drawn to a huge French war cemetery, with a sign to a German one nearby.
"Not that he hadn't been reminding them already,"
continued Paul. "He'd had the Paris Gun—the one that's always wrongly called 'Big Bertha'—stashed in a wood just below the castle. Paris is only about seventy miles down the road, as the shell flies ... I could take you to see the gun position in the wood, it's still there. But it's rather overgrown dummy3
and depressing, so I won't."
"So it's another of your 1914-18 places, where they've got to remember us—just in case?" If it hadn't been for Vendresse she would have spoken more sharply.
"It can be." He nodded thoughtfully, then stopped nodding.
"But as a matter of fact it isn't."
Elizabeth couldn't add up this reply to make a sensible answer of it, and Paul appeared to be in no mood to elaborate on it, but withdrew into himself. It was as though their passage across one of his old battlefields, on which every fold and feature had its significance for him, was inhibiting him.
Finally Humphrey Aske roused himself behind the wheel.
"You said . . . the tower—the Frenchman's tower—was still there in 1812. Was that meant to mean something, or could it have been 1912, or 1712?"
"No." Paul shook his head. "No."
"No . . . what?"
"You'll be coming to the Laon Soissons road in a moment.
You turn left, towards Soissons, and then almost immediately right, down a side-road." Paul stirred. "I meant 1812."
Aske peered ahead. "What have medieval towers got to do with 1812?"
Mitchell twisted in his seat, pulling his safety-belt away from his shoulder, and stared past Elizabeth out of the rear window, as though to get a last look at his old battlefield on dummy3
the ridge.
Then he caught Elizabeth's eye. "Your father came this way, our people think, from his rough notes."
"My father?" She frowned at him.
"Or, if he didn't, Tom Chard certainly did—'along the high road above the river to the greatest tower I ever saw'—he must have seen a few great towers along the road from the Lautenbourg, but this was the greatest. . . size and time and distance, that's how they worked it out . . . with a few other clues beside, from Miss Irene Cookridge's book, Elizabeth."
"To—?" But she had forgotten the name of the place.
"Coucy-le-Château." He nodded. "Because Coucy-le-Château is where Lieutenant Chipperfield died, they reckon."
IX
"You SEE, ELIZABETH, this is a research project with a difference— or a whole lot of differences . . . like time, for a start, obviously."
"You mean, we don't have much of it?"
"Maybe we don't have any of it. I don't know. I only know that I've taken years to reconstruct days . . . and your father, Elizabeth—he bumbled along after the Vengeful escapers for months and months, enjoying himself in the best hotels and the Michelin restaurants, picking up the odd fact here and there, but mostly useless information. But he wasn't worried dummy3
about time, anyway."
That was Father to the life in his later days, thought Elizabeth: in spite of the doctor's advice he had been convinced that the whisper of his heart in his ear was only a false rumour.
"But we have other things that he didn't have." Paul half-smilfcd at her. "Because, when you think about it, an intelligence department is well-equipped for this sort of enterprise: we have the manpower— trained researchers, who know how to ask questions, and how to interpret the answers—and we have the resources—"
"Huh!" Aske snuffled to himself. "If the tax-payers could see us now! Or are we going to publish this time? A Festschrift for Dr David Audley— 1812: Defeat into Victory? Will that balance the books?"
"And the contacts—manpower, and resources, and contacts
—"
"Professor Emeritus Basil Wilson Wilder, no less!"
"Aske—"
"Sorry, old boy! A moment's weakness . . . But Wilder is a contact—at least, if this is what your Dr Audley wants to know, he is ... And that's still ultra-secret, is it?"
Looking from one to the other, Elizabeth almost smiled; because they were Lucan and Cardigan at Balaclava, re-enacting history, with the one hating the other so much that he'd never let himself be stung into admitting that he too dummy3
didn't know why he was doing what he was doing. But since she was in this particular Light Brigade charge it was no real smiling matter.
"So you're not interested in the Vengeful any more, Paul? It's only the escapers now?"
He nodded. "That's what your father was concerned with, Elizabeth. You were right."
"After Miss . . . Miss Cookridge's letter?" Here, coming down off the Chemin des Dames ridge, Miss Irene Cookridge was no more incongruous than Julian Oakenshaw and Danny Kahn in the roll-call of names.
"Not just her letter, but the Conversations book as well.
David had people working on it half the night, and me working on what they came up with this morning."
"Doing what, Paul?"
"Plotting the route they took after they broke out of the Lautenbourg Fortress."
Aske half-turned, then his mouth closed on his unasked question and his eyes returned to the road ahead. But Elizabeth knew what was still plaguing him, because it plagued her equally; the only difference being that she knew that Paul himself didn't know the answer to it, and Aske thought he was being frozen out from the truth.
Why?
"And that was a minor epic in itself—a classic Colditz-style job," continued Paul. "Because they were shut up tight in an dummy3
old barracks between the town and the citadel, and there was no way they could get through the barracks' perimeter into the town."
Why?
"So what did they do?"
He smiled. "They climbed up into the citadel. They made ropes out of their bedding, and grapnels somehow—they were sailors, of course, and sailors are ingenious . . . And then they climbed down the other side, where the sentries weren't expecting anything. But it still must have been pretty hairy, because their ropes weren't long enough, and they had to make the descent in stages—that's the steep side of the Lautenbourg, which is alleged to be unclimbable. But they had these two ropes, which were just strong enough to bear one man's weight, and a thin one to pull the ropes back up for the next man. And the last man down fixed the knot so it would bear his weight, but then two of them could pull it free
—risky, but ingenious, as I said." He shook his head admiringly. "Tom Chard—he made it sound easy. But that's one hell of a cliff, with the wall on top of it."
"You know the Lautenbourg Fortress, Paul?"
"Uh-huh. I was down that way a few years back, when the French started restoring the battlefield of Le Linge, above Colmar." He smiled at her again. "It's a 1915 battlefield, you see, Elizabeth, Le Linge is ... I just visited the Lautenbourg in passing, as it were. But then, oddly enough, I've visited most of the Napoleonic prison fortresses they used for our chaps in dummy3
1812—a happy coincidence, you may think."
"No coincidence," said Aske. "Just an historical progression, really."
"Historical, Mr Aske?"
"Or Napoleonic, Miss Loftus. Napoleon was luckier than the British: he had all his PoW camps ready-built for him—all the old frontier fortresses that he didn't need any more, having advanced the frontier far beyond them, and beaten everyone in sight. But, of course, when he was beaten in his turn, the frontier went back to where it had started—and all the PoW camps became fortresses again . . . Arras, Cambrai, Verdun . . . Do you recognise the names, Miss Loftus?"